Hi, my name is Patrick! I am running for Foothill Municipal Water District (FMWD) Board because the Eaton fire showed how much is at stake. FMWD serves Altadena, La Cañada Flintridge, and La Crescenta.
La Crescenta was spared from last January’s fires; next time we may not be, and the recovery next door has been far too slow. I grew up in this community, am raising my two daughters here and have almost two decades of experience in water management and infrastructure financing. Currently, I lead the innovation program for one of the world’s largest water utilities.
If elected, I will focus on three priorities. First, coordinate more proactively with first responders on future disasters and speed up the Altadena fire recovery. Second, invest in innovative local water supplies like water recycling and stormwater recharge to save ratepayer money.
Third, stop the buck passing between DC, Sacramento and the many overlapping public agencies. I bring an insider's knowledge of how water agencies work, but an outsider's mind for how they should work better, faster, and cheaper. Last year's fires exposed real failures, but I firmly believe that together we can turn this breakdown into a breakthrough.
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Developing a master protocol for climate adaption. That includes a framework for assessing vulnerabilities from flood, fire, wind and other resilience needs like earthquakes as well as a tool for iteratively and adaptively investing in no to low regrets solutions to help prepare for whatever the future holds. The purpose is to help develop: innovative sources of local water supply like stormwater recharge / water recycling, a standard protocol for water agency coordination with fire agencies for controlled burns, power supplies to ensure pumping operations continue and water reliability in the face of power outages.
As part of the climate adaptation planning, my goal is to really listen to and uplift the youth who will inherit the impacts of climate change. I participated in the Youth and Government program at the YMCA in high school and will engage that and other groups. We stand at a historic juncture and need to be thinking not just about today or tomorrow's water challenges. Our changing climate primarily affects the human species through changes in the water cycle and we need to take a long term, generational view of how to steward our foothill communities for generations to come.
Advancing common sense solutions to accelerate Altadena's rebuilding. It's been over 574 days since the January 2025 fires. The community water system still has not been rebuilt and there is no viable financing plan to rebuild the retail water system — let alone invest in the future-proofed solutions that our communities deserve. Foothill does not directly manage that retail water infrastructure though does has a responsibility to ensure a reliable water supply for its service area. The Altadena recovery has been slowed by permitting delays and the confusion that comes with a pretzel palace of incredible institutional complexity.
The water management related to Altadena is case in point with four retail water systems served by Foothill and countless regional, state and federal agencies involved as well. My commitment to the community is to do everything in my power as a FMWD board member to ensure that bureaucratic red tape and institutional inertia does not stand in the way of the community rebuilding effort. This will require a collaborative, team effort across all of the institutions involved. Events like the 2025 fires serve as a reminder of how much we all count on each other and interconnected our communities across the foothills are.
In order to advance cost effective local water supplies, I will work to increase stormwater recharge. It makes less than zero sense to let rainwater flow into the ocean while importing expensive and environmentally more impactful water from the Colorado river and Sierra Nevada snowpack — even less sense given the realities of boom and bust precipitation patterns with climate change.
The Los Angeles of Department of Water and Power claims ownership over all tributaries to the LA river through a water right dating back to the Spanish. The imperial mindset implicit in LA's Pueblo water right disrespects that deeper history and the clear imperative today to steward LA's water with increased aridity. It is unethical, uneconomical and unsustainable for LA to continue importing water that drains Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra while blocking stormwater recharge projects in the LA basin.
Current hydrology highlights how shortsighted that thinking truly is. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains and Colorado River watershed is at historic lows and precipitation in the LA basin follows boom and bust patterns that climate models predict. This increases the imperative of stormwater recharge in the headwaters of the LA River basin to minimize flood risk, improve water quality and steward water resources for generations to come. I helped build and develop the first stormwater recharge bioswale in La Crescenta at the Rosemont Preserve. That project is helping save our community money and steward our precious water resources. I know how to get projects done and will use the FMWD directorship to advance more common sense solutions that save money and are good for the environment.
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